"It'd sound imposing after a while if she did it anyway."

"Would Strange not have warned you if -"

"Not if he thought I wouldn't do it, or would have trouble getting all of you to do it, if I was scared of our future space empress."

"Anyway, does this plan have enough juke tolerance that I could try approaching the space stone before the point at which Carol is introduced? In theory it shouldn't care where I am and I can and should try monologuing at it a bit now, in practice it probably won't take notice unless I seem to be within its current bearer's scope of interest or liable to pick it up imminently."

"Hmm. If Thanos captures you and finds out about other universes he might snap them up too. If something weird happens then maybe he's not trusting enough to go do famine relief on Lemistra. The plan is not super juke-tolerant, it was fourteen million to one, though I don't know how much of that was picking out Lemistra in particular, me in particular - all these particulars - what do you get if you go near the stone?"

"When I talked to mine it jumped into my hand of its own accord. But it knew me and had interfered with me twice before; this is its alt and maybe not a very good facsimile considering my own, and isn't familiar with me, except perhaps through my... not very good facsimile."

"First time I met our Loki he threw me out my kitchen window. I fell sixty stories. Luckily it's a seventieth-story kitchen. Okay, so we're not likely to get 'jumping into your hand', but - signs of friendliness? Things that might help you conclude you can peel it off him in a fight?"

"So the thing with the stones, or at least the Edda stones, is that while they are people, they prefer to pretend very aggressively in almost all situations to be inanimate objects. I don't expect it to glitter encouragingly at me. If you pick up a stone and it wanted its personal space, you and possibly the planet you're standing on are in trouble. If you pick up a stone and it approximately tolerates you, you can use it a little, maybe it hurts like crazy to hold onto while you're doing that. If it loves you, it's like my Tesseract and me. I think that the stones can't reasonably universally love Thanos - they have different enough tastes, not good taste but varied, and he doesn't seem to have had quite that insane level of fine control based on my limited evidence... Anyway, if you don't pick up a stone, you probably don't find out how much it likes you. My case was extremely anomalous and I don't know if this Space Stone will appreciate me the same way, let alone on short acquaintance. But it's not out of the question that it might if I tried; the question is, what does it cost to try."

"We probably only get one shot at the ambush. The other pieces of the plan look a little less fragile - though it wouldn't surprise me if there's only enough metal to attempt to reforge the gauntlet once, or something like that -"

Loki nods. "Anyone who, uh, decides they believe my frankly incredible story about belonging to an interdimensional organization that can do nearly anything except get here promptly, and I wouldn't blame anyone for not being such a someone, can relax a little. The wizard doesn't seem to have had advance knowledge of me and mine, incidentally supporting the hypothesis that these stones are also adjacency-limited, so the fault tolerance of this plan isn't predicated on something like you all having souls and being unresurrectable, or something annoying like that. With enough coordination, even if confronting Thanos is impossible, we can move all of the relevant planets far enough away that Thanos can't find them, put them somewhere nice, and get started on the logistics and vetting processes for magic powers that bring everybody back, and the only lasting inconvenience is that people have to adjust to different local laws of faster than light travel and stuff like that."

"It's good to have a backup plan better than 'attend a lot of funerals, try to prevent the collapse of civilization.'"

"I think we can do better than 'move a lot of planets' but it's a reasonable floor and we've had to do it once, a few stars were rigged to be eaten by spiders, long story."

"I don't even know how many people there are in the universe.  - Earth doesn't have FTL. Possibly I should've been working on that. Coulda made some friends, run into those Guardians in peacetime or something."

"I don't know how much of the universe matches but more people looking to get infinity stones before Thanos did would have been good."

He was even forewarned. He was forewarned and he nearly destroyed the Earth for Thanos and then alienated half the people who could fight him and successfully recruited exactly one ally. Who was a sophomore in high school. 

"Okay, let's try to read Nick Fury's diary and then go from there."

"Who's Nick Fury?"

"He ran S.H.I.E.L.D., back when that was a thing. He worked with us on saving the world, which has come up surprisingly often this decade. Strange says Fury knows how to reach the people we need. But, regrettably, Fury's a dustbunny, so hopefully he wrote it down."

"Mkay. Say, anyone have a pen -"

"A pen?" says Cap.

"My boyfriend can conjure arbitrary material objects including letters I write here, but I have to do it in physical medium, if I write in illusion it's not a material object."

"I've got a pen," says the raccoon, digging around in his pockets. "No, that's somebody's thumb. Thought I had a pen."

"I can keep dictating to Tony's computer, that's fine, I want to send a longer letter earliest convenience though."

"I expect that Wakanda would be happy to provide you with your own transcription-capable computer."

"That would be great. I really have no excuse for leaving my computer behind while tromping through the apparently dimensional teleportation capable mushrooms but I have learned my lesson."

"Are we welcome in Wakanda, we kind of just dropped in -"

      "I don't know who's in charge," says Natasha, "but it'd surprise me if evicting us was their top priority."

"T'Challa's dead?"

      "Yep."

"Any guesses on the engineer I am supposed to meet."

      "I suspect you want Princess Shuri."

"Then let's head in, get Loki her computer, meet the princess, figure out where we're looking for Fury's stuff."

Loki follows along with the people who know what direction they're going.

Wakanda is in something of a state of chaos, sirens blaring; there are people leaning against buildings and sobbing. Empty levitating trains zip by. 

She doesn't have anything for these people on hand. Hurry up, peal.

They speak to some people. They get into an elevator. It elevators them through an elaborate underground complex at least two hundred times the size of the aboveground city. 

"Princess Shuri is occupied," someone tells them when they get out of the elevator. "You will have to wait."